


The Wrong Horse

by CaffieneKitty



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Demons, Gen, Hair Braiding, Season/Series 03, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-08
Updated: 2008-08-08
Packaged: 2018-01-02 08:53:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1054863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaffieneKitty/pseuds/CaffieneKitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Four seperate missing scenes, sort of loosely connected. Based on a thought I had about Ruby and Lilith. POV Ruby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wrong Horse

**Author's Note:**

> _Originally posted on August 8, 2008_

Ruby crouched in the shadows beyond the parking lot with the wrecked helicopter, watching the possessed crowd storm in. She heard the gunfire, the screaming. The exorcism on tape was clever, and forced her further back into the darkness, out of earshot, feeling like her borrowed skin was suddenly too tight. Sam's voice, voice of the boy-king. Such a waste.

_When Azazel was around, you danced to his tune, his blood, singing inside you. He was eradicated, his power and control left, and since then it's all been you, Sam. You denied your power, because you've denied yourself, who you are._

_I can't stop what's going to happen to Dean. You can. All you gotta do is stop denying your birthright. Dean's death would make you do that, but things are stepping up, and Lilith might kill you and anyone following you before you get around to being what I need you to be. Ruler of the Demons, Bringer of Hell on Earth._

_I can't wait for you to be that anymore, Sam. There's picking a side, there's rooting for the underdog, and then there's wasting time trying to make a stone grow legs so you can follow it._

_You're not just the wrong horse, Sam. You're a dead horse._

_I'm going back to her. Maybe that was the only answer this whole time. Maybe it's just what she did to me that makes me want her dead._

Ruby watched the lone demon that had escaped the precinct-house before the virgin and Deputy Dork finished sealing it off lope off through the night and followed him.

-

"You need me."

Lilith tilted her head to the side. "You have pretty hair."

Ruby touched her long blonde hair self-consciously. "I possessed her because of it. I thought it might remind him of his mother and his girlfriend, make him find it easier to trust-" She dropped her hand. "It gets in the way."

"Sit, Ruby."

Ruby looked for a chair.

Lilith leaned over in her Disney Princess armchair and patted the floor between her feet. "Sit."

Ruby looked around at the demons standing guard, then went and knelt before Lilith.

"Not like that, silly. Turn around."

Ruby hesitated for a second before turning her back to the demon in the little girl's body.

"Why, Ruby?" said the little girl behind her. Something rattled on the play table beside her. "Tell me why I need you."

"Because-" Something touched Ruby's head and she froze before she recognized the feeling as a hairbrush. Lilith pulled the brush through the long blonde hair, deft little hands dividing it into sections. "Because they still trust me. I can get at them. They'll let me through their defenses."

"And why should _I_ trust you?" asked Lilith, pulling and tugging on Ruby's hair, binding it into braids.

Ruby gritted her teeth. "You know why."

Lilith giggled. "Is it fun, remembering?"

"No."

"But humans seem to have so much fun. You!" Lilith snapped.

One of the guards, a woman in front of Ruby, straightened to attention. Ruby sat perfectly still, waiting.

"I need ribbons." Lilith held out one of the braids in Ruby's hair. "What do you think, pink? I think pink."

The demon guard scowled and went off to fetch ribbons.

"Such fun little lives. Cake and parties and pretty things to play with. Remembering that must make it easier to be a damned soul."

None of Ruby's memories of being human contained cake or parties. Or even many pretty things. As the demon guard passed a handful of deep pink ribbons to Lilith, Ruby remembered picking wildflowers that color. Wildflowers in a meadow, for the unhallowed grave of her infant son.

"It doesn't make anything easier," she said.

"You betrayed me to the Winchesters, now you betray them to me. You are..." Lilith tied a ribbon into Ruby's hair as she searched for the right word. "Fickle. What's to keep you from going back to them?"

"Sam Winchester is hopeless," Ruby sneered. "He'll never be powerful enough to beat you. He even lost the Colt."

Lilith giggled. "Did he really now? How interesting."

That hadn't been the reaction Ruby was expecting, but Lilith was hard to predict sometimes.

"Would you go back to him if he found the Colt?"

Ruby answered, "No."

"Hm. I think that sounded like a hesitation," Lilith sing-songed.

"It wasn't," Ruby said quickly.

Lilith slid something over Ruby's shoulder, cold metal slipping along beside her neck. Ruby tensed. Not a knife, a hand mirror. "Disobedience and disloyalty will not be tolerated, Ruby. Betray me and- Well. There are much worse things than remembering your humanity."

Ruby held the mirror, staring at her braided and pinkly beribboned reflection. "When the Winchesters are dead, will you let me forget?"

"Hm?" said Lilith, lowering her small head next to Ruby's to examine her handiwork in the mirror, white eyes next to black.

"Will you finally let me forget being human?"

Lilith giggled again and yanked on one of Ruby's braids. "We'll see."

-

Ruby didn't recognize the woman who came down the staircase at first, but she didn't need to. She knew the presence of another demon. As the woman approached though, Ruby recognized her as the woman who'd fetched pink ribbons for Lilith to braid into her hair. Ruby crossed her arms.

"Well." The woman smiled, eyes flipping black. "If it isn't the one that remembers. If we'd have known it was you, we never would have come."

Ruby kept her arms crossed, watching the woman, listening to voices upstairs, two more demons, furniture being turned over.

"Maybe we should just go back and tell her we couldn't find you." The woman clasped her hands behind her and walked back and forth at the limit of the Seal above Ruby. "Maybe we should tell her you changed your mind again and went back to the Boy-King for real instead of for show, at her command. Betrayer."

Ruby snarled at the woman. "Maybe if she sent you here to release me, you should shut up and do it."

The woman snarled back. "I've been with Lilith from the start. I served her in Hell, and she brought me up with her. What I want to know is how a turncoat like you can prance in, and suddenly I'm the errand-runner sent to fetch you?"

In the room above there was a loud rumble, and a crack arced through the ceiling over Ruby's head, breaking the seal.

Ruby stepped out from under the broken seal and smirked. "Maybe she doesn't like your hair."

The possessed woman swung a fist at Ruby, who caught her hand by the wrist.

"Maybe it's because I'm the only one of our kind who has even the slightest bit of Sam Winchester's trust, and the only one who can get him to do what she needs him to do." _Even if it makes no sense._ Ruby flung the woman's hand away. "Or maybe you should leave Lilith's reasons for wanting me to herself and follow your orders like a good little flunky."

The woman glared. "When your part in this is done..."

"Whatever." Ruby said, stomping up the stairs, not looking to see if anyone followed.

-

 _Sam does trust me._ Ruby thought, a few hours later, standing in the ensuite bathroom of a house surrounded by demons in New Harmony. _Idiot. I would never have let me out of my sight._ She opened the bathroom window a crack and waited.

A second or two later, a spume of demon smoke poured into the room, and then into her.

Ruby braced herself on the sink, watching as her eyes flipped to black in the mirror, out of her control. She could feel Lilith pushing in, pushing her aside, the pressure like a slab of stone crushing her.

She panted over the sink. "Okay. You're in. Now what?" The mouth she'd been using for a year suddenly felt awkward.

The hands of her borrowed body came up to smooth down her hair. Ruby felt herself falling back, shoved under the surface, drowning, awareness of her body fading as Lilith took it over. In the mirror the black of her eyes swirled away, replaced with white.

"Now what?" Ruby repeated, finding that the lips in the mirror no longer spoke her words.

"Now you get your reward, silly," her former reflection spoke, voice soft and sing-songy.

"Y-you'll let me forget being human now?"

"Of course. I'll _make_ you forget being human." Teeth. Ruby hadn't known her body had had that many teeth to smile with. "I'll make you forget being anything."

Ruby lost sight of the face in the mirror and felt her self crushed smaller and smaller, compressing into a thimble, smaller, down to nothing. Her last awareness before the white-hot flare pinched her out of existence was of her body giggling and the smell of pink wildflowers.

\- - -  
(that's all.)


End file.
